Cadet Shaders

January 26th, 2026 note:
I've dropped the price because I'm exploring new stylized rendering techniques in Unreal, and I want to encourage others to learn or build upon my work! To all those who have purchased this before at its original price, I cannot thank you enough for your support! Your work inspires me every day to push my own even further!

These filters procedurally apply painterly lighting effects to real time projects in Unreal Engine. Work dynamically with any lighting setup, any model, in any project. The shader takes the existing lighting you have, and re-builds it to look like your lights and shadows are painted on. Of course you can fully customize the light masks, colors, and textures to fit your project.

You can see my original Cadet project here, including videos: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aoLJQq  
This project includes some fixes not described in my 80 Level article, and the parameters are more organized than my previous versions.

The project contains:

• Original Cadet Shader + Cleaned up version
• Updated Cadet Shader
• Material Layer Blend system Shaders
• Simple Sharpen Filter
• Character Master Materials for Clothes, Face, Eyes, and Glass
• Character Model and Textures (+3 tileable textures)
• Simple Lookdev Scene Demonstrating Shader
• Documentation (Usage, Tips, and Troubleshooting)

Important notes:

• This project only works with Unreal Engine versions 5.3.1 and above
• Performance has not been properly tested for games
• Documentation assumes you have basic knowledge of Unreal
• The personal and commercial versions are the same, the latter just has a higher price to justify commercial use
• With whichever license you get, feel free to modify the shaders! I'm curious to see what you come up with!

Feel free to reach out to me any time! 

• Added CadetDemoWorld level to display shader features and functionality
• Fixed issue with overlapping geometry and stencil masking 
• Added function to change projected texture tiling per stencil mask
• Improved FakeBG functionality with stencils
• Added options to disable the filter in areas based on stencil masking
• Added MLBA_LightMaskSTENCIL to allow material layer system to use new stencil features
• Added material functions (MF_Selector123 and MF_SelectorAny) to help select stencil masks
• Added MF_FakeShiny to make creating fake highlights in materials easier
• Added MF_SizeScaling to scale textures based on object size
• Re-organized CadetShaders folder structure
• Cleaned up Cadet base material into Basic_CadetMTL
• Cleaned up glass material into StyleGlassMTL3
• Updated documentation to describe new features (and added a tldr)